Twitter Reach

Although Twitter as a social media channel might be growing at a much slower pace in the last few quarters, but with its 300 million+ user base, it is still a huge platform for brands to promote their business. By Twitter reach, I mean the total number of tweet impressions and interactions with your tweets. As a brand, it is important to increase the same. In this article, I would like to share some really simple and actionable tips to boost your Twitter reach.

1.) Interact and Engage

It has been said millions of times that social media in general and Twitter in particular is not a medium for a one-sided broadcast by the brands. You cannot expect people to interact with you on Twitter and spread your content through retweets, unless you begin an interaction with them.Use Twitter Search to find out the topics related to your business and industry and then interact with those people who are talking about the same. Here are some easy ways to interact:

Retweet: You should retweet those tweets which are meaningful and insightful as per your business or industry. By retweeting someone, there is every chance that, that particular person will notice you.

Reply and Ask: Often consumers have certain queries and they ask for the same on Twitter. If you listen well, you may come across potential customers. Reply to their queries. Also, don’t forget to respond to the queries asked to you by other users. You can also ask questions directly to the influencers or other users related to your business or industry.

If you are regular in this aspect, this itself will take you places.

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2.) Use Pictures and Videos

There is enough research on the internet as to how content with pictures and videos performs much better than just a plan text. This is true for the entire social media, including Twitter. This official research by Twitter reiterates the same. So, always try to tweet with pictures or videos unless you are replying to someone where that is not required. For example, following tweet by ISRO shares pictures along with the links of the article and thus gets a lot of engagement:

3.) Use Right Time and Frequency

Analyse your Tweets of at least last 2 weeks and see at what time generally, you get more engagement, replies, RTs etc. This way you can narrow down on particular days and time slots when you get more engagement. So you can tweet your best content during those time slots as well as interact (as shared in point 1 above) more with your audience at that time.Also apart from the right time slots, also take care of the right frequency. You should have higher frequency at those time slots when you have more interaction and engagement with your tweets. Also frequency should not be too high at any given time, unless you are running a valuable Q&A session or some contest. Otherwise users will feel spammed and highly likely would unfollow you. So maintain restrain and discipline.

4.) Make the Copy Better

Twitter has its own best practices. Use to-the-point copy in your tweets, wherein you fit your message within 140 character limit. Copy should be clear, straightforward, possibly with the benefit to the user (like link to a particular landing page), so that the user feels like clicking and interacting with your tweets.For example, following tweet by Buffer is offering a particular benefit and enticing the users to know more about that offer with a very refines copy (they are also using an Emoji to attract attention):

5.) Use Hashtags

Twitter initially popularised the use of hashtags on social media. In fact, that was its USP. Twitter does it the best by sorting out the information hashtag. The public nature of tweets helps with that, while on other social networks, people have their privacy on and their updates are not generally accessible publicly.Always use the relevant hashtags, so that if anyone is searching regarding that particular hashtag, they can come across your tweet. Although exceptions can be there as shared in an example in point 4. Hashtags help increase the reach by as much as 16% as per the Twitter research shared in point 2. For example, Amazon India recently launched a 360 degree campaign during IPL, called #ChonkpurCheetahs and they used it effectively on Twitter:

6.) Use Links

Research proves that using links in your tweets helps increase the reach. You can use two types of links. One pointing towards your blog posts or website links and the others which you curate from around the web. Just remember that whatever links you share, they should be of value to your target audience. Then you will not go wrong. Following research by Salesforce proves that you can get a jump of more than 80% in the RTs if you use links in your tweets.

7.) Repeat the Tweets

On Twitter, the shelf life of tweets is very less, and also all the users are not online all the time. Although Twitter has tried to make changes in its algorithm to showcase some of the important tweets which you may have missed but such tweets are from the individuals or your friends rather than the brands.And secondly the content which you share on Twitter, and which has value in it, should not be wasted just by tweeting it only once. So, you must tweet any piece of your content, like a blog post, video post etc. at least thrice across different time zones or days. For example, you can have a calendar to post each content on Day 1, Day 3 and Day 7. You can decide your own frequency, but this way you will get higher reach on Twitter and get more hits on your content also.

8.) Run Twitter Chats and Q&A Sessions

Twitter chats and Q&A sessions are an excellent way to engagement the users and increase interaction with them. Ideally, as a brand, you should run Twitter chat once a week (on a particular day and time) with a branded hashtag, for e.g. #BufferChat.As you can see in the above link, how this creates so much value and engagement with the users. Similarly, there are many chats being run on Twitter by different individuals or brands like #ContentChat, #HootChat, #AdobeChat and so on. You can plan it out and run a branded chat each week for your target and thus increase your reach. As a bonus, this entire conversation each week can be turned into an insightful blog post wherein you can mention the top users and their tweets, thus creating a viral effect once shared on social media.

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9.) Ask for Retweets

Do you remember seeing some brands and individuals putting “Plz RT” at the end of their tweets? Yes, such tweets tend to get much more Retweets and thus increase your reach. Dan Zarrella (the social media scientist) had proved this fact many years ago and it holds true even today.Just remember, not overdo it. Don’t ask for a RT in each of your tweets. Maintain a restraint, you can set a ratio of 1:2, i.e. for every tweet where you ask for a RT, you also do two tweets where you do not ask for a RT. Also, see the context, that in what sort of tweets, asking for a RT will sound better. For example, tweets where are you asking for help, or tweets which you are feel are genuinely useful for your target audience, there asking for RTs will make much sense rather than just blindly putting them in other promotional tweets.

10.) Run Contests

Running a hashtag based contest or a campaign is an excellent way to promote your brand as well as engage the users. Twitter generally is an excellent medium to run contests (due to its open and viral nature). Of course, contests compulsorily have to have some form of gratification to the participants, otherwise no one will participate.And you do not need to giveaway some very expensive gifts either. Simple gift vouchers, or gift hampers work as well too. Just you need to play the game fairly and smartly. For example, plan your entire contest beforehand. Decide what sort of contest will you run. Plan our some of the basic tweets priorly. Also plan out how you will create pre-contest buzz and also once the contest is over, how you will thank and gratify the winners so that there are no conflicts latter on. Having a clear set of Terms and Conditions regarding the contest and sharing it beforehand with the users, always helps avoiding any controversies latter on.

How To Measure Twitter Reach

This is a bonus section in this article. Since we have discussed how we can increase the Twitter reach, it is also important to know how to measure Twitter reach so that you are on the right track. For that I recommend another of my article, which will take you through different aspects of Twitter Analytics and how to measure that.

Conclusion

Twitter reach can be increased a lot using all the points shared in this article. All you need to do is apply all of these tactics and be regular in it. And soon you will start seeing the desirable results. Just keep on experimenting with your Twitter tactics. Enhance those activities which bring better results and cut on those which do not bring you desirable results. Hope you have found the tips in this article to be actionable and useful. If you have any query, please ask in the comments section below.

Harman has executed a wide variety of Digital Marketing campaigns across different companies and marketing agencies in the last 8 years. After working full-time with different organizations, he is currently working as a freelance digital marketing consultant. His interests include reading books and taking a walk amidst greenery.